Seriously don't know what arm9 hax... Is. I use menuhax for launching gateway from boot.

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Because a9lh happens so early in the boot process it can be used to help unbrick your device if you ever get into that situation, it's a lot hard for nintendo to create an update to break it (if that's even possible I haven't heard). When you boot you don't see all those crazy colors it just boots directly to whatever file on your sd card you tell it including directly into specifically formatted homebrew for recovery. So instead of having hard mod you can restore your nand easily if you brick. It also has 100% boot instead of sometimes getting stuck on boot because menuhax fails. You basically really can't tell the difference between the emunand boot and the regular boot. The only disadvantage I can see is you can no longer boot without an SD card which I kind of hope they eventually fix it but that's not a huge deal since most people keep their SD card in full time anyways.

Seriously don't know what arm9 hax... Is. I use menuhax for launching gateway from boot.

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It's a hack that loads at an even lower level than menuhax, before the system is even booted up. You get CFW (or whatever you want to run) starting an instant after you hit the power button.

It has four main benefits:

100% boot rate into CFW or tools like Decrypt9

Much quicker booting times (you can go from cold boot to Home Menu in under 10 seconds, if you don't have a 128GB SD, even if you use emuNAND)

You can recover from nearly any kind of brick, as long as FIRM0 and FIRM1 are intact (this is where the 3DS stores the kernel; A9LH installs itself there, and not many things even touch FIRM0/FIRM1, and most A9LH-compatible CFWs prevent them from being modified)

If you've always wanted a sysNAND CFW that you can update to the latest firmware and boot into immediately, now's your chance (but note that you are not forced to use that, or to give up emuNAND, this seems to be a common misconception).

Of course, it comes with a risk: you have to downgrade to 2.1 to get your OTP, which is data you need to install the hack. But if you follow Plailect's guide on Github, you should be fine, it has step by step instructions and tools to automate a lot of it.

A9LH supports booting a payload before anything else loads, so in-case you bricked your sysnand, you can restore a backup without a hardmod. You can ditch emunand and just use sysnand. Boot time and rate is also better (around 300% better) than menuhax.

It's a hack that loads at an even lower level than menuhax, before the system is even booted up. You get CFW (or whatever you want to run) starting an instant after you hit the power button.

It has four main benefits:

100% boot rate into CFW or tools like Decrypt9

Much quicker booting times (you can go from cold boot to Home Menu in under 10 seconds, if you don't have a 128GB SD, even if you use emuNAND)

You can recover from nearly any kind of brick, as long as FIRM0 and FIRM1 are intact (this is where the 3DS stores the kernel; A9LH installs itself there, and not many things even touch FIRM0/FIRM1, and most A9LH-compatible CFWs prevent them from being modified)

If you've always wanted a sysNAND CFW that you can update to the latest firmware and boot into immediately, now's your chance (but note that you are not forced to use that, or to give up emuNAND, this seems to be a common misconception).

Of course, it comes with a risk: you have to downgrade to 2.1 to get your OTP, which is data you need to install the hack. But if you follow Plailect's guide on Github, you should be fine, it has step by step instructions and tools to automate a lot of it.

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I followed this, worked a treat. Although the downgrade is SUPER SCARY because of how little feedback it has. :-/

A9LH supports booting a payload before anything else loads, so in-case you bricked your sysnand, you can restore a backup without a hardmod. You can ditch emunand and just use sysnand. Boot time and rate is also better (around 300% better) than menuhax.

There's another benefit that i noticed, some games (like EUR Fantasy Life) have some problems with emunand (it crashes in shops and corrupts savegame), but with A9LH you can CFW to sysNand and it prevents those problems (at least with Fantasy Life, is the only game I encountered problems with in emuNand).
EDIT: Well, at least that's what I noticed, it could be a coincidence and the problem was fixed by another thing.

I use a 128GB SD card, will I notice any improvements in loading if I install arm9loader? Also does this completely eliminate the need for custom firmware and emuNAND?

Also could someone drop a link please on an easy to follow guide? While having this sounds like it carries a lot of benefits there is also the risk of bricking so I would really like to mitigate that as much as possible. Please and thank you.

Worth the risk without a hardmod setup? If I do every step correctly, I still have a chance of hard-bricking?

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i will have to say if you follow the guide step by step you will be fine, i dive in and did my N3ds hyrule edition and my old 3ds Fire emblem edition in the last 2 days and they guide is pretty well written. The only way i can see you bricking your 3ds if you decide not to follow the guide or something crazy happend like power goes off or somebody closes your 3ds in a critical setup. So keep your 3ds charging and dont let toddler and dogs touch your 3ds when you are doing this, it will take around 1 to 3 hr depending on the 3ds. I hope this helps and if you decide to join the a9lh master race welcome lol...

Worth the risk without a hardmod setup? If I do every step correctly, I still have a chance of hard-bricking?

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I followed the guide and I've since installed A9LH on two 3DS's and one 2DS. No bricks and was pretty painless. Most of the programs used have since been improved greatly and are a lot safer compared to their older counterparts.
But if you are running Gateway, you may want to stick with Menuhax for now. The Gateway team did say they were working on A9LH payload.

Worth the risk without a hardmod setup? If I do every step correctly, I still have a chance of hard-bricking?

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There's always SOME risk, but with the current setup, the risk is minimized significantly. That being said, obviously if some freak accident happens like your battery dies mid-downgrade, or if you miss the step to double check that wifi is turned on before downgrading, there's some potential for soft bricking or potentially even hardbricking.

1.) Get rid of your emuNAND, it's useless with A9LH because you can setup a permanent CFW on sysNAND.
2.) Update your sysNAND to the latest firmware version and still be able to run ARM9 payloads, just milliseconds after you press the power button.
3.) Never again have to deal with managing two NANDs.
4.) Have a free 2 gigabytes of extra space on your SD card (by getting rid of emuNAND; it's pointless).
5.) JOIN THE A9LH MASTER RACE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

A cool thing about A9LH: It makes it possible to patch and modify things about the system that wouldn't be possible otherwise. This isn't extremely explored now, but nice things can come out of this, full modifications to certain apps, hardcoded patches, even more resources available to homebrew. Right now it just boots better and allows NAND backups/restores, but it could be much more.

Menuhax is less stable though. Sometimes menuhax itself will fail to boot, and other times menuhax will work properly, but then the cfw payload will fail to boot after that. So each time you turn on your console there are two potential points of failure and it gets annoying after a while. Plus, doing things like going into system settings or playing DS and GBA games will reboot you to sysnand and require you to launch emunand again afterwards.

I use a 128GB SD card, will I notice any improvements in loading if I install arm9loader? Also does this completely eliminate the need for custom firmware and emuNAND?

Also could someone drop a link please on an easy to follow guide? While having this sounds like it carries a lot of benefits there is also the risk of bricking so I would really like to mitigate that as much as possible. Please and thank you.

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1. Improvements in loading
2. Eliminates need for emuNAND
3. Your SD card becomes the only thing that can boot your system
4. Higher bricks occur on N3DS for some reason but I installed it to mine
5. It's incredibly better then menuhax
6. It's like having a hardmod